Montana Mavericks, Books 1-4

by Diana Palmer

  His ungrateful attitude infuriated Maris. She had gotten out of a warm bed to drive through a dark and rainy night to help him out, and he hadn’t even said thanks. She stopped her car next to Luke’s truck. “Thank you, Maris,” she mimicked. “Why, you’re very welcome, Luke.”

  Luke had his door partially open, and was ready to hop out. He stopped to look at her. “You’re right. Sorry. Thanks for coming to the rescue. See you at the ranch.”

  Maris’s anger suddenly drained away. “Luke, I know you don’t understand me, but I really don’t mean to make you angry. You said that I’ve got you going in circles. You should know that I’m feeling pretty much the same about you.”

  Without warning, he slid across the seat, clasped the back of her head and pressed his mouth to hers. It was a hard, rough kiss that set Maris’s heart to pounding. Her body responded immediately, and she attempted to gentle the kiss by parting her lips and seeking his tongue.

  He broke away and narrowed his eyes on hers. “Why did you kiss me back?”

  She swallowed. “Why did you kiss me at all?”

  He muttered a curse. “You’re driving me crazy.” With that quixotic message, he slid back across the seat and got out in the rain, giving the door a hard slam behind him.

  Perplexed, Maris sat there until he had gotten into his truck and started the engine. Then she slowly pulled away and headed for home.

  Obviously they were driving each other “crazy,” because her heart still hadn’t settled down from that wild kiss and now she was wondering if it ever would again. God help her, she thought dismally. She had to be falling in love with Luke, and if that wasn’t asking for trouble nothing ever would be.

  Luke drove about a hundred feet behind Maris’s car during the rainy miles to the ranch, his shoulders hunched forward, his features grim. He had given a part of himself to Maris Wyler that he’d never given to any other woman, and he didn’t know how to get it back. Call it heart, call it soul, he thought resentfully, angrily, but when he left the No Bull after the horse auction, he’d be leaving without it.

  It was the strangest sensation he’d ever experienced, but he couldn’t think of one single way to alleviate its sting. That damned IOU had brought him more pain than any one man deserved, physical as well as emotional. Right now his split lip hurt like hell—a sane man wouldn’t have kissed a woman so hard with a split lip—and the bones in his body that he’d broken in his fall last year were aching and throbbing, probably from both the fight and the damp weather. He felt like a bag of weary, hurting old bones, and he could hardly wait to reach the ranch and crawl into bed.

  They finally got there. Maris parked the truck, got out in the rain, ran over to Luke’s pickup and yanked open the door before he could. “Are you okay? I was thinking on the way home that you might need some aspirin or something.”

  Nimbly Luke crawled out of the truck, keeping his numerous aches and pains to himself. “I don’t need anything, thanks.” He started for the barn.

  Frowning, Maris watched him for a minute, then shivered from the cold rain penetrating her clothing and ran for the house. But instead of going directly to her room, she stood at the kitchen window and tried to see the barn through the downpour. Eventually a light came on in the loft, appearing as a ghostly beam in the dreary night.

  Sighing unhappily, she left the window and went to bed.

  Fifteen

  It was still raining in the morning. Luke and Keith put on waterproof ponchos and went out to work with the horses, while Maris sat down and began making calls to the business offices of Wyoming’s telephone company. She got nowhere. “Sorry, ma’am, but that information is not available,” she was told repeatedly. All she wanted was to know if there was a telephone under another name at Katherine Willoughby’s old address, but apparently the telephone company considered that privileged information.

  Finally, frustrated and irate, she dialed the sheriff’s office and asked for Judd. He came on the line.

  “Sheriff Hensley.”

  “Judd, this is Maris. Listen, I need a tremendous favor. Can you go through legal channels or contacts or however you do these things and find out if a certain address in Wyoming has a telephone? I’ve been on the phone for hours trying to get the information, but no one will give me an answer.”

  “I can try, Maris. What’s the address?” She recited the data. “Might take a while. I’ll call you back when I know anything. Incidentally, Rivers has to appear before Judge Mathews on Thursday at 9:00 a.m. Did he tell you?”

  “Your deputy told us both last night. Luke will be there. Judd, if Luke paid for the damage to Pete’s place and he dropped the charges, wouldn’t that be the end of it?”

  “Pete’s pretty upset, Maris. I doubt if he’d drop the charges for any reason.”

  “Hmm.” Maris was thinking hard. “Well, thanks, Judd. I hope you have better luck getting that information than I did.”

  “What do you need it for, Maris?”

  “You know the horses Ray bought? Well, I located the bills of sale and they were signed by a Katherine Willoughby with that address. I want to speak to her about the horses’ ancestry. Luke thinks there’s some good blood in the herd, and if we could prove it my horses would bring a much better price at the auction. But there’s no phone in her name and I thought it might be listed under someone else’s name.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Maris. Talk to you later.”

  Maris got up from her chair with a determined expression. While Judd was throwing his legal weight around on that address and telephone number, she was going to take a little drive into town.

  Walking into the Sundowner Saloon took courage for Maris. She wasn’t accustomed to visiting taverns by herself, and seldom had even done so in the company of others. At least there were very few patrons on this rainy day, she thought gratefully while going to the bar.

  A pudgy middle-aged man behind the bar came over to her. “Hello,” Maris said with a smile. “I’m looking for Pete Riddick.”

  “You found him, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

  Maris extended her hand over the bar. “I’m Maris Wyler.”

  “Wyler? Uh…would you be Ray’s widow?” Pete shook her hand.

  “Yes. Mr. Riddick, there was a fight in here last night, and one of the men involved, Luke Rivers, works for me.”

  Pete’s face lost most of its friendliness. “Mrs. Wyler, I try to keep a nice, peaceable place here, the kind of place a man can bring his wife for a drink and feel comfortable.”

  “I understand.” Maris glanced around. “It’s very…pleasant.” She looked for damage and couldn’t spot any. There was a row of booths along the far wall and tables and chairs separating the booths from the bar. Her gaze returned to Pete Riddick behind the bar. “Let me get right to the point, Mr. Riddick. If I paid you right now for whatever damages were incurred by that fight, would you consider dropping the charges against Luke?”

  Pete cleared his throat. “You’d pay right now?”

  Maris withdrew a handful of cash from her purse. “Yes, right now.”

  “I have a list of the damage,” Pete said, as though issuing a warning.

  “May I see it?”

  “Just a second. I’ll get it.” Pete walked to the back bar and picked up a piece of paper. Returning, he handed it to Maris.

  She read it quickly: Two tables…$250. Three chairs…$150. Glasses…$30.

  “I’m gonna ask the judge for an extra two hundred for the trouble of having to order new things,” Pete said.

  “So we’re talking about six hundred and thirty dollars,” Maris said with a wince she couldn’t completely conceal. She’d brought the last of the cash from the yard sale with her, never dreaming the cost of the damage would require nearly all of it.

  But her bills were current and the bail money she had handed over to the deputy last night—two hundred and fifty dollars—would be returned if the charges were dropped. The values that Pete Riddick had placed o
n his things were much too high, considering that every stick of furniture in the place showed evidence of longtime usage.

  She wasn’t going to argue values, however. Not when there was a chance Judge Mathews would make an example of Luke and sentence him to some jail time. The summer was waning. Labor Day was only a week away, and Maris wanted desperately to stick to her plan of a horse auction at the end of September. Luke had to be free to finish his work with the horses, and besides, she really couldn’t bear the thought of him sitting in jail and coming out with a record that would follow him ad infinitum.

  To whet Mr. Riddick’s appetite for immediate payment, Maris counted out the correct sum and laid it on the bar. “The truth is, Mr. Riddick, I need Mr. Rivers at the ranch, and Judge Mathews might not be in a benevolent mood on Thursday.”

  Pete rubbed his mouth, his gaze on the neat stack of cash. “Well, I don’t like causing a widow lady undue stress, Mrs. Wyler. Ray used to drop in now and again, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.” Ray had “dropped in” at every saloon and tavern in the Whitehorn area on a regular basis. The Sundowner could have been the place in which he’d done his drinking the night of his fatal accident. Maris had never attempted to find out which establishment had allowed him to walk out too drunk to drive, because, in truth, she never had blamed anyone else for anything Ray had ever done. Her philosophy had always been that adult human beings were responsible for their own actions. Which she’d sort of been forgetting, she thought with an inward wince, recalling how she’d been looking for someone to blame for her own recent behavior.

  “Well, what do you say, Mr. Riddick? Do we have a deal?”

  Pete eyed the money again. “Would you tell Rivers that he’s not welcome in here again?”

  “If that’s what you want, yes. Mr. Riddick, what really happened last night?”

  “Rivers started the fight, Mrs. Wyler.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “All I know is that Jim Benteen was on his way out and Rivers stopped him with some remark about pond scum.” Pete shook his head in disgust. “They weren’t even sitting anywhere near each other, Mrs. Wyler. Jim was in that corner booth and Rivers was sitting at the bar, just about where you’re standing now.”

  Maris tried to visualize the scene. Why on earth would Luke leave his seat and start a fight with a man he didn’t know? There wasn’t any sense to be made out of something so irrational, but then she remembered that Luke had been in a foul mood when he’d left the ranch and maybe that was all the incentive he’d needed to pick a fight.

  She sighed. There was an awful lot she didn’t know about Luke, though in God’s truth she never would have thought him the type of man to engage in barroom brawls. She especially wouldn’t have thought him capable of instigating that kind of trouble.

  “There were women in the place, too,” Pete said, as though the presence of the fairer sex increased Luke’s crime a hundredfold.

  Maris felt as though the wind had just been knocked out of her. A woman. Of course. She should have figured that out for herself. Jealousy clawing at her insides startled her, and she suddenly wanted this over and done with. Pushing the money forward, she asked again, “Do we have a deal, Mr. Riddick?”

  Pete hesitated, then reached for the cash. “Yeah, we do. I’ll call the sheriff and tell him to drop the charges.” He folded and tucked the money into his pants pocket. “Just be sure and tell Rivers to stay away from here.”

  “Gladly,” Maris said coolly. “May I have a receipt?”

  Driving into the ranch compound, Maris saw that the corral was vacant. The rain, coming down in sheets, had apparently driven Luke and Keith inside. She went into the house, calling, “Keith?” When she got no response, she figured Keith was with Luke.

  The phone rang, and she picked up the kitchen extension. “No Bull Ranch. This is Maris.”

  “This is Judd. Pete Riddick called and dropped the charges against Rivers.”

  “He said he would.”

  “How’d you talk him into it?”

  “I didn’t do much talking, actually. But I did lay cash on the bar to pay for the damages.”

  “Rivers didn’t gain any respect from me by sending you to do his dirty work,” Judd growled.

  “Luke doesn’t even know about it.”

  “He doesn’t. Well, now, seems like you’re taking mighty good care of your hired hand, Maris.”

  “Judd, please. I need Luke out here, and…”

  “Yeah, I think maybe you do. About that information you asked me to dig up—there’s no longer a telephone at that address you gave me, but there’s a Katherine Willoughby living in Sheridan. Got a pencil handy?”

  “Right here.” A little sick at heart over Judd’s comment about her “needing” Luke—it certainly hadn’t been said in a flattering tone of voice—Maris wrote down the address and telephone number Judd recited in her ear. “Thank you, Judd. I really appreciate this.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ve gotta go, Maris. Another call.” The phone went dead.

  After hanging up, Maris sat there feeling rather numb. Obviously Luke and Jim Benteen had fought over a woman. Judd believed she and Luke were carrying on an affair, which they were. Sort of. And now she had to tell Luke what she’d done about getting his charges dropped, and she suddenly wasn’t so sure that she should have done anything without discussing it with him first.

  Well, there really wasn’t any reason to rush out into the rain to impart the news. Grim lipped, Maris dialed Katherine Willoughby’s Sheridan number. It was answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Katherine Willoughby?”

  “Yes, it is.” The woman’s voice was melodious and pleasant.

  “My name is Maris Wyler, Ms. Willoughby. About four months ago you sold ninety-three horses to my husband, Ray Wyler. Do you recall the transaction?”

  “Certainly. And please call me ‘Katherine.’”

  “Thank you. Um…those horses were very green, Katherine, and I have a man breaking them. He’s quite familiar with horses and mentioned that some of them appear to have excellent conformation and might be from a good bloodline. That’s why I’m calling. Do you have any information on the herd’s ancestry?”

  “Not at my fingertips, Maris. Your husband, Ray, was apprised of the situation at the time of the transaction.”

  Maris took a breath. “Ray died shortly after buying the horses, Katherine. I’m sorry to have to bother you with this, but he told me nothing about the herd and I really do need any information you might have access to.”

  “Oh, you poor dear. Please accept my condolences. Losing a loved one is most difficult and very trying to the spirit. Well, let me begin at the beginning. Those horses belonged to my father, who became very ill about three years ago. I moved out to the ranch to care for him, and with him being gravely ill for so long, the horses were certainly my last concern and totally ignored. That is the reason they were so completely untrained. They grew up on the range without any human contact whatsoever. Your hired man is correct in his assumption that most of the herd has good blood, and I know Dad kept excellent records regarding their lineage. However, after Dad died I sold the ranch, lock, stock and barrel, and I can’t think what I might have done with those records, or even if I kept them.”

  “Ray didn’t inquire about the herd’s lineage?”

  There was a lengthy silence in Maris’s ear. Finally Katherine said, “I honestly can’t remember, Maris. But it seems only sensible to assume he didn’t, or I would have given him the data. Are you certain you don’t have it?”

  “Very certain, Katherine. I’ve gone through everything in the house and really only found the bills of sale a short time ago.”

  “Well, I’m glad you have those, at least. Maris, give me a few days to gather my wits and think about those records. I was quite shaken over my father’s death, even though I knew it was coming. At any rate, there are blanks in my memory connected to thos
e unhappy days and the ensuing weeks when I was selling Dad’s property. Give me your telephone number. I’ll call you one way or the other.”

  Maris recited her phone number. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your cooperation in this, Katherine.”

  “I think I understand, Maris. Besides, it’s information you should have…if I can just think what I might have done with those records. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Katherine, and thank you again.”

  “You’re quite welcome, my dear. I’ll be calling.”

  Maris put down the phone with excitement pumping through her system. Luke was right; her horses weren’t just run-of-the-mill range animals. If Katherine found those records and they could be presented at the auction with each horse, the value of the animals would increase greatly.

  This was very good news, and Maris became anxious to tell Luke about it. Besides, he might even look upon her talking Riddick into dropping those charges as good news. Sometimes she was such a pessimist, she chided herself. Why on earth wouldn’t he be relieved over not having to appear in court?

  Going to the kitchen door to brave the rain in a run for the barn, Maris stopped to frown at the wall hooks and what they contained. Keith’s poncho was hanging there, and why would he have brought it to the house, then returned to the barn without it?

  She gave her head a small shake to clear it. These days everything seemed like a problem of one sort or another. But Keith running around in the rain without his poncho was hardly a major crisis.

  Yanking up the hood of her own rain jacket, Maris left the house and jogged to the barn. Inside she lowered the hood and called, “Luke? Keith? Anybody here?” Luke’s pickup was parked in its usual spot, so the question was merely to let them know she was in the building.

  Luke appeared at the top of the ladder. “I’m up here.”

  “Figured you were.” Maris started up. “It’s really pouring out there.”

  “We had to quit working.”